Date Published

Date Built

CPU Clock Rate

CPU Temperature While Idle

CPU Temperature Under Load

GPU Core Clock Rate

GPU Effective Memory Clock Rate

GPU Temperature While Idle

32.0° C

GPU Temperature Under Load

58.0° C

Description

Note: The benchmarks in this post have been updated on 29th of September 2014. This PC was originally built in April 2013.

Recently I made the PC free of dust and I upgraded the build with some new parts and perhiperals. That is why I decided to reupload the PC build to PCpartpickers with some new photo material as well. Hope you all like the new pictures I took, first 3 pictures are from the old upload.

Description:

PC build is will be used mainly for gaming, photoshop, videoediting, virtualisation and moleculair modeling. I wanted this build to perform well, look clean and besides that nothing fancy. I tried to route the cables as good as I could, if you guys have any tips be my guest.

Part selection:

CPU: needed a CPU with a lot of horsepower and I needed hyperthreading for virtualisation and modeling, the Intel I7 was my best option. I bought the K version because every little bit of extra muscle I am able to squeeze out of a CPU is welcome.

Motherboard: I don't like how PCBs look like and the thermal armor on this one covers most of that, the motherboard comes with some little features such as voltage and temperature monituring which I like very much.

CPU cooler: had some great reviews and I like the looks of it, very clean with the black and white.

RAM: needed fast RAM for the vast amounts of data which is generated with the moleculair modeling. Why I didn't buy cheaper RAM? Because I really like the looks of the thermal armor and I read that the RAM modules were able to overclock very well.

SSD: best and fastest SSD available at the time.

HDD: have had a lot of great experience with seagate drives in the past, 1TB wasn't enough for me so I bought the 2TB version.

Case: I really like corsair cases due to their great build quality, have used many corsair cases in the past and they look really nice. My other choice was the Corsair T600 but the 650D had my preference with the brushed aluminum.

PSU: wanted to buy a fully modulair PSU, came up with the tier 2 OCZ Z series because it had some good reviews.

OS: as mentioned this PC is used for virtualisation and virtual machines and I didn't want to run into things I couldn't due to the Windows version I am using, so I bought the most comprehensive version available.

Keyboard: love this thing looks very nice and the cherry MX red switches are perfect for me. If you didn't figure already I like the looks of metal surfaces.

Mouse: needed a high DPI, and accurate mouse and it looks nice next to the keyboard.

Headphones: I like listening to music and Steelseries is known for their good quality sound production.

Overclocks:

CPU: Increased frequency from 3.6Ghz to 4.8Ghz, later decreased to 4.6Ghz because I didn't like the temperature.

GPU: Added 150Mhz to the core clock rate and an additional 500Mhz to the Memory clock rate.

RAM: Lowered frequency from 2133Mhz to 1600Mhz, as a result I was able to decrease the Cas Latency (CL) from CL9 to CL6.

Problems I ran into: I started of with buying 8GB (2x - 4GB) Kingston Hyper-X Beast RAM running at 2133mhz, however after a month of failures I found out that one of the bars was defect and was giving me at least three BSOD in a week. I now use one of the RAM modules for a Barebone PC I bought.

Yes I did, at the time it was the most powerfull single GPU card available on the market. It did come with 4GB GDDR5 RAM and a metal backplate which was kind of special at the time. Thanks for the upvote and nice comment!

Np ;) Guess you could just wait for the GTX 880 to come out or get another 680 and do a SLI. However I believe that GTX 680 is already EOL so you'd probably have to buy one on ebay if you decide to do that.

I find no fault in this build. Great cable management. I can see by the benchmarks this rig is still going strong, and I love your part choice. Your future upgrades will make this pretty awesome, I can't wait to see it when it's done (although when is a build ever done? :P) +1

Nice build, tight cable management, Corsair Dominator ram, love the 3770k, should've looked into a 750G PSU from EVGA since they're a gamers best friend and you should give them money :D I have the same headphones, and they are amazing. Great Build

EVGA life, my 780 ti is inbound due to their fabulous offers, not to mention a 5 year warranty. Now if only they made a cheaper mobo, larger case, and a cpu cooler that was neck and neck with the CM 212 EVO :)

Very very nice brand! I also like the dedication of EVGA to only use nVidia based graphics cards, just like Club3D for AMD/ATI based cards (another one of my favorite brands btw). I know for sure that I will buy the EVGA Hadron at a certain moment in time just because I love that case.

I have almost completed my computer, held onto my 770 for a bit so I could just stack some more cash and get necessities than did step-up for the 780 ti. I'd appreciate it if you look at my build when it pops up again on the completed builds section. Should be about 3 weeks from now since I'm going home for a while :) I'm also going to fix a couple things I messed up on my personal build

Wow! The only thing I'd change at the moment is get some custom black/white sleeved cables or maybe black/silver or just black, otherwise it looks flawless :) It is near exactly what I want my build to look like.

I can't thank you enough for the amazing comment and upvote! The PC is still going strong. Although the GTX 680 is still performing perfectly for the molecular modeling I did notice that the frames per second are dropping below my liking during gaming on Ultra and Max Anti-Aliasing.

That is why I made up my mind to buy the EVGA GTX 980 SuperClocked with ACX 2.0 cooling. I am waiting for it to become available in my country, should take another week or so.

When it is installed I will be updating the build and you will see it pop up in the completed build section. As mentioned thanks for the comment and your time to have a look at my build.

This really depends what you are planning to do with the PC. I did notice that you didn't add a CPU cooler to the Intel build link, if you are buying the Intel build don't forget to buy a good CPU cooler for extra overclock performance.

Second of all, with a budget like this I would certainly add a SSD of at least 120GB (240GB is prefered) as this is going to speed up your build much more than a CPU is going to. Something like the Samsung EVO 120GB.

If you need any more help please let me know, you can always send me a personal message. If you like my builds please leave a like.